My reflections on interweavings of music/sounds and dance/movements begin with a statement by the composer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti, who believes that “all music is danceable if you understand what it is about”. This could be in line with cognitive science based studies in music theory, which state that we – spontaneously and intuitively – perceive music as an invisible yet audible movement in space and time. In this context György Ligeti’s descriptions of his compositional process are also revealing. In addition to listening and sound imagination, Ligeti senior gives special importance to a very fine sense of movement – sensorimotor skills which also include haptics and tactility. Such a direct connection between listening and moving – ultimately a kinesthetically permeated listening – is also essential for those choreographic works that start from musical templates in order to “translate” them artistically and creatively. As an example, Elisabeth Schilling’s choreography Hear Eyes Move is used to analyze György Ligeti's 18 Études pour piano.
Such multisensory translation processes cannot primary be about creating analogies between musical and dance parameters. Rather, it is also important to emphasize the differences between the various materialities and medialities of the arts, which interfere (e.g. through de-/synchronization processes) as well as they emerge (e.g. through overlays of comparable expressive qualities). Based on this premise, not only the structural nature of composition and choreography and their relationships are of interest when analyzing the interplay of music and dance. Questions also arise about possible audiovisual, kinesthetic or sensory perceptions. Against this background the so-called choreomusical research – whether as an artistic practice or as a theoretically based analysis – can be supplemented by perceptual-aesthetic reflections and extended in the direction of a research into sound and performative movement.
Stephanie Schroedter, music and dance scholar, is professor for Theories of Music and Movement/ Rhythmics at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where she is also involved in the artistic doctoral program. After completing her doctorate at the Musicology Institute of the Paris Lodron University Salzburg she has taught as research fellow, visiting and substitute professor for musicology, dance studies, as well as theater/performance and media studies and worked in several research projects supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). In 2015 she received the “venia legendi” (“venia docendi”) for Musicology and Dance Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin (2015). Her last research project “Bodies and Sounds in Motion” (funded by the DFG) dealt with methods for analyzing the interweaving of music/sound and dance/movement in performances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Keywords: Choreomusical Research, Choreomusicology, Performance Analysis, Translation Studies, Interweaving of Sound and Performative Movement, Interdependencies, Interferences, Forms of Vitalities, Kinaesthesia, Kinaesthetic Listening
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